Dead NASA satellite will soon plummet to Earth

September 8, 2011
By SETH BORENSTEIN , AP Science Writer

NASA says one of its dead satellites will soon fall to Earth but there's very little chance that it will hit someone.

The space agency doesn't know when or where its 20-year-old satellite will drop. It will probably be in late September but could fall in October. And it could land anywhere south of Juneau, Alaska, and north of the tip of South America. NASA says there is only a 1 in 3,200 chance of satellite parts hitting someone.

Experts say don't worry. In the more than 50 years of the space age, no one has ever been hurt by falling space debris. The 6-ton satellite was used to monitor the atmosphere. Most of it will burn up during reentry. Only about 1,200 pounds of metal should survive.

Related Stories

Russia is looking to build a $2 billion orbital "pod" that would sweep up satellite debris from space around the Earth. According to a post on the Russian Federal Space Agency, Roscosmos' Facebook site, (which seems to confirm ...

The launch of the first artificial satellite by the then Soviet Union in 1957 marked the beginning of the utilization of space for science and commercial activity. During the Cold War, space was a prime area of competition ...

Recommended for you

(Phys.org)—A small team of researchers from the U.S. and Italy has found evidence of a naturally formed quasicrystal in a sample obtained from the Khatyrka meteorite. In their paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, ...

As a cosmic dust magnet, Saturn's C ring gives away its youth. Once thought formed in an older, primordial era, the ring may be but a mere babe – less than 100 million years old, according to Cornell-led astronomers in ...

Scientists on board NASA's flying telescope, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, caught sight of roiling material streaming from a newly formed star, which could spark the birth of a new generation ...

Astronomers have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes to show that a recently-discovered galaxy is undergoing an extraordinary boom of stellar construction. The galaxy is 12.7 billion light years from ...

A professional astrophysicist and an amateur astronomer have teamed up to reveal surprising details about an unusual millisecond pulsar (MSP) binary system comprising one of the fastest-spinning pulsars in our Galaxy and ...

12 comments

I would like to point out that 1 in 3200 chance of the satellite hitting someone is quite high. If you are standing in a 3200 square foot house, and a small piece crashes through the roof, it has about that chance of crashing directly over your head...so...

Also, we need to stop having our satellites plunge harmlessly into the tundra. We need to start having the satellites accidentally hit official presidential residences in pyongyang, NK.

While that first part skews the statistics; I must say that I 100% agree with the second part. Especially due to the plausible deniability... we could just say 'OOPS we didn't have any control over that...' Haha, perfect.

While that first part skews the statistics; I must say that I 100% agree with the second part. Especially due to the plausible deniability... we could just say 'OOPS we didn't have any control over that...' Haha, perfect.

The first part only skews the statistics in that the one in 3200 is the total for all pieces of the satellite, and the example may illustrate it as a closer call than it may actually be.

I understand that it is still a very small chance, but the math still stands - the point is, for falling debris, that is a very high chance - just compare it to the odds for other debris falls from space to hit someone.

Not to mention what happens if it doesn't come down in one 1,200 lb. chunk? There is always a possibility during re-entry of the satellite breaking into two or more pieces that could cover a large swath of area increasing the chance of loss of life and property.

There was a dumb show called dead like me where the main character was killed by a falling satellite in the first episode then was a ghost or something like that for the rest of the series...

I don't know why I'm posting this...

Actually I think she was killed by a toilet from the de-orbiting Mir space station. Anyway, I presume your reason for posting was that S*** Happens and if you happen to be in the wrong place at the right time then those bad things can happen to you. Or you could have been thinking that the chance of you getting hit by a piece of space debris is considerably higher than your chance of winning the lottery...

Where did you study statistics and probability, that_guy? You could say the same about standing in a 3200 sqwuare mile area and you would conclude the same odds of getting struck by a pice of debris. What idiocy.

For that matter, NASA should also have its knuckles rapped. Just exactly what does that mean, "there is only a 1 in 3,200 chance of satellite parts hitting someone"? What that says is that 1 in every 3,200 people are going to get whacked with a piece of space debris. Come on, guys. Smarten up!

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.